Skills are the New Currency

The last two years have changed everything in the world of work. Seemingly all at once, more people than ever before started to rethink not just how and where they work but also why they work. It was a moment of unprecedented economic and behavioral change. And it’s led to a complete reset in the relationship between employers and employees, with expectations for work higher than ever.

But that wasn’t the only big change playing out. While our views about work were shifting in fundamental ways, so was the world around us. With remote work taking off, the pandemic accelerated the speed of digital transformation. If you look across the economy, it’s clear that almost all businesses are either technology businesses or technology-enabled businesses, which is impacting all of us day to day. 

We spend a lot of time thinking about how best to navigate this new world of work. And it’s become increasingly clear that the best way forward – for individuals, businesses, economies and societies – is a skills-first mindset. Recent LinkedIn data shows that the skills sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015. By 2027, this number is expected to double. That means jobs are changing on you even if you aren’t changing jobs, just as business demands are changing on you even if you’re not changing your business. 

It’s clear that ‘skills’ is having a moment. Skills-first hiring was mentioned in the recent State of the Union address and a growing number of CEOs are calling on the need for companies to shift how they hire. And organizations like Opportunity@Work have shown the undeniable benefits of a skills-first economy for communities that have been historically disenfranchised.

For most of our lives, the way people got hired was based primarily on the degree they earned, the job they had, or the people they knew. Any discussion of skills would rely on those proxies to decide if someone is a good candidate. That’s changing. Workers better understand the need to articulate the skills they have and the skills they want, especially as we all seek work that is more rewarding. And businesses, eager to fill roles in this historically tight labor market, have started to focus on whether people have the skills to get the job done. 

A year ago we shared our aspiration to help accelerate the shift to a skills-first approach to hiring. Since then, we helped more than 400,000 companies make a skills-first hire in 2021. Now, 40% of hirers on LinkedIn are using skills data to find talent, up 20% year-over-year. What’s more, these hirers are 60% more likely to find a successful hire than those not relying on skills as part of their hiring process. Simply put, a skills-first labor market is emerging all around us.

We’re seeing this come to life when we speak to people like Magen Perdue, who was able to pivot from her role as a front desk host with Hyatt to Operations and Human Resources Assistant at a management company. By highlighting her skills in employee training, customer satisfaction, leadership, time management, and conflict resolution on her LinkedIn profile, Magen was able to open up a career path when a recruiter saw all of these skills she already had. And by focusing on skills, her organization stays competitive with great employees that are invested in constant upskilling.

Looking ahead, I see a once-in-a-generation opportunity for LinkedIn to help create a skills-first economy that meets the moment we’re in. Here’s how:

Focus on skills to make hiring easier and more efficient 

Nearly half of 2020’s college grads are unemployed 6 months after graduation. Jobs–and the skills needed to do them–are changing rapidly so even if you have a degree, a job isn’t guaranteed. 

The good news is that many of the top skills in fast-growing and higher paying roles are similar to skills in other fields. For example, a cashier has 70% of the skills needed to be a customer service representative, and a driver has 57% of the skills needed to transition to a supply chain associate. Companies need to focus less on traditional signals like degrees, and more on finding talent whose skills match the role. 

We’ve made strides over the past year to make LinkedIn a place where skills are infused into the entire hiring experience – where hirers can rely on skill signals to increase hiring efficiency, expand their talent pools, and enhance the ability to assess candidates. Our Skills Graph enables us to help organizations speak the same language so that we can better understand and describe the skills people have, the skills companies need, and the skills needed in the future. 

And as our product lead Hari Srinivasan outlined today, we’re doing more to help companies move to a skills-first approach. For example, we’re adding easy filters for hirers to find when a candidate’s skills match what’s in their job description in our Recruiter product along with giving members the ability to add relevant skills for each job experience on their profile, making it easier for recruiters to quickly assess candidates’ skills in a way they trust.  

Focus on career development to improve retention 

The Great Reshuffle has led to a dramatic increase in workers finding new opportunities – in the US alone, the share of LinkedIn members changing jobs has risen 30% compared to 2021. Employers are struggling to fill open roles fast enough and retain employees. This is in large part because of changing expectations – workers are more willing to walk away now if companies don’t invest in the things that matter to them.

Employees consider opportunities to learn and grow as the #1 driver of great work culture, yet only 52% feel their manager encourages the use of work time to learn new skills. By caring about employees’ careers, investing in their skills development, and helping them pivot into new roles, companies benefit too. When leaders offer growth opportunities through internal mobility, they retain their employees nearly twice as long as their peers.

To help companies provide their employees learning and growth opportunities, we’re investing more in our skill-building platform, LinkedIn Learning Hub. Soon employees will be able to better discover development opportunities such as personalized learning, communities, and open internal jobs. When we make it easy for people to take their career development into their own hands, learn the right skills for the moment they’re in and achieve their goals, the world lights up with opportunity. 

Embrace the opportunity of a skills-first world

At LinkedIn, we have a unique view of the economy and the way that skills are becoming foundational to employment. With more than 36,000+ unique skills our 800M+ members have added to their profiles, and 17,000+ LinkedIn Learning courses members can use to build new skills, we have an incredible opportunity to help create, support and propel a whole new kind of job marketplace.  

Never in the history of the labor market has there been a clear or reliable way to understand whether people and jobs are matched in the most efficient way. We’ve relied on the proxies we know–like degrees and titles–and in turn, created a labor market that works only for some, not all. Skills can change that. By harnessing new data and tools that make it easy for people and companies to identify talent based on skills, along with the access to building more diversified and equitable networks, we have the ability to help fill the most in demand jobs based on what a candidate can do. This will not only create greater equity in our economy, but also greater dynamism. It will create new levels of progress and prosperity all at once. 

As the saying goes, talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not. If we come together across sectors and societies, this can be the moment when we finally address that imbalance once and for all.